Battery life has been reliable for me. Even on heavy days of use where I’m navigating, streaming music, snapping videos and pictures, the iPhone 17e lasts a full day with around 20 percent left before bedtime. With lighter use, you can probably extend it to two days on a single charge.
The last omission that may annoy some is the lack of the ultra-wideband chip. This is what Apple uses to help you precisely locate AirTags after you’ve misplaced an item. Without it, you’ll see vague instructions on where your lost item is. It’s weird that this iPhone doesn’t support an important capability of Apple’s widely popular tracker.
Lone Camera
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
I know several people who do not care about the camera on their smartphones. They rarely take pictures, and I imagine their phone library is just full of receipts and other mundane documents they’ve tried to scan. If that’s you—no judgment—then the iPhone 17e will serve you well. For everyone else, it’s a different story.
Buy a very cheap phone, and you’ll probably see that it has three cameras on the back. Two of them are probably useless, and the main camera is passable. Apple’s approach is to stuff one very good 48-megapixel camera, which is great if this phone were $429 like the iPhone SE of yesteryear. No, at $599, you should absolutely expect at least two cameras on the back of your iPhone. (This was also a big problem with the $999 iPhone Air.)
A single camera is just too limiting, even if it’s adept at snapping pics. I had a water leak on Friday and had to take a picture of my utility closet, but with no ultrawide camera (unlike the Pixel 10a), I had to awkwardly stand far back and angle the phone up high to get everything in the shot. Maybe you want to take a wider group shot or a gorgeous ultrawide close-up of a cathedral’s entrance. Well, you can’t with the iPhone 17e. You can tap the 2X zoom option to get a decent digitally zoomed close-up, but when Samsung offers a solid 3X optical zoom on the Galaxy S25 FE (frequently sold for under $500), it’s hard to understand why Apple can’t match.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
